1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed herein relates generally to systems for the collection of medical and population survey data and, more particularly, to a system for the collection of data about health problems, handicaps, water supplies, living conditions, and people at risk using an iconographic, color-coded indicia to denote family members, dead children, major medical conditions, handicaps and treatments, and other data, such iconographic, color-coded indicia being selectively positionable on an anonymous but individually coded survey form, from which a digital image is made and electronically transmitted to a searchable database storing a collection of such survey forms for purposes of providing ease of access to medical records and the development and implementation of palliative care, intervention, and prevention programs.
2. Description of the Background
Epidemiological surveys are an often used tool to analyze medical and other data relating to the quality of life of large numbers of diverse individuals. The collection of such data may be a valuable tool for public health organizations, government officials, hospitals, and even individual health care providers in studying the wide-spread health effects of environmental contaminants, socioeconomic factors, family histories and genetics of segments of the population, political oppression, and any other factors that might tend to affect a person's health and welfare. By studying and understanding such effects of such external factors on the health and welfare of wide segments of a given population, public health organizations, government officials, hospitals, and individual health care providers are better equipped to adopt policies, programs, and care regimens that provide treatment and preventative intervention to persons who show greater risk of developing health problems, and to concentrate such efforts on wide populations where such epidemiological data indicates a need for more concentrated intervention. The conducting of such surveys requires direct interaction with the survey subjects, collecting often times highly sensitive medical and personal data. The collection of such sensitive data is critical to enabling an accurate survey that in turn may be used to identify medical risks and needs of large populations to in turn plan and implement appropriate programs to provide treatment and preventative intervention.
Unfortunately, many areas of the world have underdeveloped regions in which the collection of sophisticated epidemiological data is highly impractical due to illiterate populations, lack of communications and transportation infrastructures, cultural differences, language barriers, and geographically disparate (and at times nomadic) populations. Likewise, underdeveloped areas in which armed conflicts take place, including bombardment by chemical and biological weapons, result in large numbers of the population exhibiting grave health problems which reflect an extreme need for the development and implementation of plans for medical treatment and preventative intervention. However, in such areas that have be ravaged by the ruins of war, many members of the population have lost loved ones and themselves endured serious injury and medical ailments which are highly sensitive issues for persons to discuss, particularly with strangers attempting to assimilate survey data.
Such epidemiological surveys also have widespread applicability in industrialized nations, enabling the assimilation of such data among particular ethnic groups or populations displaying common socioeconomic factors to in turn plan and implement appropriate programs and policies to provide treatment and preventative intervention where needed.
Thus, a need exists to provide an epidemiological survey which may uniformly be used to collect data from widely diverse populations having various socioeconomic, cultural, genetic, ethnic, and economic characteristics, which fosters the collection of such data from a geographically diverse population into a common searchable database, and which may be effectively implemented to collect highly sensitive and emotionally charged data from persons while minimizing the emotional strain placed on the subject of the survey.